Component Pluggable Dialogue Framework and Its Application to Social Robots

This paper is concerned with the design and development of a component pluggable event-driven dialogue framework for service robots. We abstract standard dialogue functions and encapsulate them into different types of components or plug-ins. A component can be a hardware device, a software module, an algorithm or a database connection. The framework is empowered by a multipurpose XML-based dialogue engine, which is capable for pipeline information flow construction, event mediation, multi-topic dialogue modeling and different types of knowledge representation. The framework is domain-independent, cross-platform, and multilingual. Experiments on various service robots in our social robotics laboratory showed that the same framework works for all the robots that need speech interface. The development cycle for new dialogue system is greatly shortened while the system robustness, reliability, and maintainability are significantly improved.